Hollywood Ending (19 page)

‘Who knows? Maybe someone famous died in your apartment once too. In Los Angeles you have a one in three chance of moving into a place where a celebrity used to live.'

‘You have a lot of useless information in your head.'

‘I guess so,' I said. I was quite happy for it to be that way; useless trivia meant there wasn't enough room for other thoughts. Darker thoughts. ‘Well, I'll see ya.'

I started to walk away, hoping he might call out to me, but I heard the engine roar as he sped off. I had a strange sensation in my stomach, like milk curdling. Now that Jake was gone, the dark thoughts were forming again. When I was with him everything felt lighter. As I walked across the lawn I struggled to keep the demons from pulling me back down. I imagined them clawing their way through the crisp summer grass, tearing away at the soil and the weeds and tugging at my ankles. When I was with Jake the demons disappeared. I wanted it to stay that way.

As I walked towards the balcony I heard Lynette's rickety porch chair swinging behind the eucalypt. The air was still and for a moment I wondered if Lynette had come home early and curled up on the porch with her latest casebook or one of those crappy police procedural novels she loved. But her car wasn't in the driveway. As I came closer the squealing of the chair stopped. I took the steps one at a time, peering slowly around the corner.

‘Benji.'

‘Hello Hilda.'

He looked a mess. His cargoes were smeared in mud and he stank of sweat. I could see it dripping down his temples.

‘What have you been doing?' I asked, not really wanting to know the answer. ‘You look like shit.'

‘You're the one who should be looking like this. I thought you and Lynette were doing yard work today?'

‘Oh, we were going to, but a case came up and she had to go,' I said, ‘so—'

‘So who was that guy?'

I played dumb. ‘What guy?'

Benji shook his head as if clearing away whatever was rattling around inside. ‘The guy in the fucking convertible.'

‘He works with Lynette,' I lied, although I wasn't sure why I didn't just tell him the truth. Like Benji had said, I was allowed to have other friends, wasn't I? ‘I took her some lunch and he dropped me off home. Are you spying on me, Benji?'

He stood, walked towards me, and I took a step back. He broke into a broad grin and put his arm around me. ‘That's what I love about you Hilda,' he said, rubbing my shoulder, ‘so feisty. I've never met a chick with so much moxy.'

It was like being in a bear's grip. I squirmed. What was it they said about bears? It was best to play dead and let them roll you around a bit. They'd eventually lose interest.

‘That's just because you never meet any chicks,' I said. Benji softened his grip, laughed, and I carefully pulled away like it was the most natural thing in the world.

‘That's exactly what I'm talking about,' he said. ‘Come on. I've got something awesome to show you.'

He dragged me down the street towards his car.

‘Benji, I'm really tired. Can't we do this tomorrow?'

‘No Hilda! We cannot do this tomorrow. You're going to love it. I promise you.'

TWENTY-SIX

A moment later we were in Benji's car and speeding downtown into parts of Los Angeles most people refused to go. We drove past the gates of Chinatown, the slums of Koreatown, the junkies of Skid Row. I locked my door.

‘Where are we going?' I asked again.

‘This is the best part of the city,' Benji replied. ‘This is where the real gritty living happens. I love it.'

Benji was right, but there wasn't much to love. Downtown Los Angeles was the nerve centre of bureaucracy and civil administration, the engine room for the city. During the day this part of town administered to our waterworks and power stations, processed our criminals and made our laws. Then at night it became a ghost town, and one by one the homeless people shuffled out of their cardboard boxes like zombies in a Romero film, taking over the streets. I looked at Benji's clothes. His knees had grass stains and his boots were caked in mud, which hardened and dropped to the floor in big clumps. Benji didn't seem to notice.

‘Why the hell are you covered in dirt?' I asked. ‘Don't tell me you actually
have
gone and joined the army this time?'

He looked down at his muddied cargoes. ‘I've been hanging out with these guys I met in a chat room. Hilda, you've got to meet them. They're just like us, into the same things. This one guy, Ted, he's awesome. He's into the sickest shit.'

Coming from Benji that was saying something. I was, however, relieved that Benji had found some other friends. Only a few weeks ago the idea would have filled me with anxiety, but now I was happy there was someone else to share the burden of Benji's neuroses. ‘You still didn't tell me why you're all dirty,' I said.

‘Oh, that. Today we dug up a grave.'

I was sure I hadn't heard that right. ‘Did you just say what I think you said?'

He gave me a grin that put me on the edge of my seat. ‘Hilda, it was amazing. It was a fresh one, just filled in this morning, at the far end of the cemetery where no one could see us. We dug it up, had a look inside, then filled it in again. Man, you should have seen this guy. He looked so
fresh
, but he was, like,
so not there anymore
.'

I didn't say anything. Benji was crossing boundaries I had never dreamed of traversing. In my mind it was one thing to look at photographs on the internet, but digging up graves and gawking at dead bodies was quite another.

‘You just have to meet these guys Hilda,' he said with enthusiasm. ‘You'd love them.'

We continued driving downtown, past Boyle Heights, City Hall, the USC Medical Centre. I wondered how Hank was doing.

‘Look,' Benji said. ‘There it is.'

He was pointing at a nondescript government building, one storey, painted white. ‘That's the Coroner's Office,' I said.

‘Sure is,' he replied, and before I knew it Benji had cut across traffic and turned into the car park.

‘You brought me to the Coroner's Office? Why the hell would I want to come here, Benji? Of all places!'

‘Jesus, Hilda. Do you ever stop? Just trust me. You are going to get a kick out of this.'

I followed Benji into a small reception area that was bare except for a few scattered plastic chairs and a vending machine. The walls were panelled in fake oak and the floor was hard concrete. A large woman sat in a corner chair, her back to us. Two young girls sat either side of her, holding her hands. The woman rubbed at her eyes with bunched up tissues, some of them dropping on her feet and on the floor. One of the girls looked up, her eyes filled with tears. Benji strolled up to the tiny reception window and smiled at the lady seated behind it.

‘Good afternoon ma'am,' he announced loudly. ‘We are looking for the gift shop.'

The women sitting in the corner looked up at us, disbelieving.

‘No problem,' the receptionist said, to my surprise. She took two visitor passes from a drawer and slid them beneath the glass.

‘Go to the next building,' she instructed. ‘Knock on the door in reception and take the elevator to the first level. Room 208. It's at the end of the corridor.'

‘Many thanks,' Benji smiled, as if he had just received directions to the gorilla enclosure at the zoo. I lowered my head as we walked past the woman in the corner with her family, their hands interlocked in quiet solidarity.

‘Are you high?' I said as we walked out the door. ‘What the fuck are you doing?'

‘Chill out.' He handed me a visitor badge and stuck his own to his jacket. It took him a moment to find a spot that wasn't plastered in dirt. ‘This is all totally legit.'

‘Did you see that family Benji? Do you know why they were there? They were identifying a body! I want to go home.'

He stopped walking. ‘But don't you want to see the gift shop?'

I paused. I couldn't believe a place like this would have a gift shop, but the receptionist had confirmed its existence. At the very least I was intrigued.

‘Okay,' I said. ‘But it's the gift shop and nothing else. This isn't a fun park.'

We walked into the next building to find the reception area deserted. Benji knocked on a wood-panelled door and waited. A portly woman wearing glasses and a suit opened the door and eyed our visitor passes.

‘Can I help you?' she asked me.

‘We're looking for room 208,' I said.

‘You mean the gift shop?'

‘I guess so.'

The woman ushered us into a sparse corridor lined with offices and pointed towards the elevator. ‘Second floor,' she said. ‘Turn right.'

‘Thank you so much,' Benji said.

‘Do you have to be so goddamn happy?' I snapped. ‘How about a little quiet respect?'

‘Quiet respect? Hilda, I'm going shopping!'

Two men wearing stiff white shirts entered the elevator carrying folders and clipboards, barely glancing at us. ‘There's a .22 slug in the hallway,' one of them said. ‘We have to move him now. It's messy.'

‘After I check out this stabbing in 314,' the other man said, looking down at his papers. I looked at Benji and he winked at me, rubbing his hands in excitement.

At the end of the corridor on the second floor was a converted office with a tiny sign that read ‘Skeletons in the Closet'. We walked in and found a small room decked out in merchandise branded with the LA County Coroner name: baseball caps, T-shirts, bags, even mouse mats decorated with the outline of a dead body and plastic skulls for holding pencils. A pleasant-looking woman with frizzy hair sat behind a desk that doubled as a counter. She smiled at us as we walked in.

‘I can't believe this,' I said, picking up a key chain in the shape of a toe tag. ‘This is by far the strangest thing I have seen in this town, and that's saying something.'

‘This shit is cool,' Benji said, putting a cap on his head. ‘I look like I'm from CSI.'

‘We used to sell jackets as well,' the woman said to us. ‘They looked like official jackets, with CORONER written on the back. We had to pull them when people started turning up at crime scenes in them, pretending to work for us.'

‘No shit,' Benji said.

‘They had no idea what they were doing and usually ended up trampling all over the evidence.'

‘Cool.'

Benji bought two baseball caps and a T-shirt. ‘You want anything?' he asked. There was a time when I would have leapt at all this stuff, but today everything seemed wrong. I shook my head.

‘It goes to a good cause,' the woman said, sensing my uncertainty. ‘All the money goes to educating kids about drink driving. We bring them in here on tours, make them look at the bodies of crash victims. It's very effective.'

‘I'm sure it is,' I said, ‘I'm fine. Thank you.'

Benji looked at me, shrugged, and handed over his credit card. As soon as he had paid I left the room and started to make my way back to the elevator. The building was old and sterile, and I couldn't help but think of how many dead bodies we were surrounded by, hidden behind locked doors and dumped in passageways.

This place was different from the streets and houses we visited, where the famous and infamous had met their demise. Here there was no mythology, no feeling that you had stumbled upon a sacred place, imbued with history and story and legend. There was only the smell of formaldehyde and the tedious bureaucracy of the processing and disposal of remains. Here bodies weren't sacred; they were paperwork.

I felt Benji's hand around my arm as I walked towards the elevator, pulling me in the opposite direction.

‘What is it?' I snapped, eager to leave.

‘Not that way,' he said, and motioned to the other end of the corridor. ‘Let's have a look around.'

‘We're going to get into trouble.'

‘No we won't. Just act like you're meant to be here. I want to do some exploring.' Then he was off down the corridor, and I had no choice but to trail behind, cursing that I had once again allowed myself to be taken in by one of Benji's misguided adventures. He raced towards the end of the hall, rounded a corner, and I chased after him, holding my breath, unsure of what we would find.

‘Let's go back,' I said, and Benji let out a yell.

‘Holy shit!'

At the end of the dark corridor was a gurney. There was no one around, everything was quiet, and it looked like someone had parked it there and forgotten about it. Under the soiled white sheet, I saw the unmistakable form of a body, its feet pointed towards us.

‘That's it Benji,' I said, my hands covering my face. ‘We're going.'

But he was already bounding down the corridor towards the gurney, and before I knew it he was right beside the body, looking down at it. Without hesitation he yanked the sheet back. The body of a young man stared at the ceiling with open eyes. He had black wispy hair, looked no older than a teenager. His skin had started to turn blue.

Benji pointed to a small clean hole above his heart.

‘He was shot,' he said. ‘See the bullet wound?'

I shrank against the wall.

‘What are you doing all the way over there?' he said. ‘Come on. It's not going to do anything to you. It's a corpse.'

I stayed where I was, slowly craned my neck forward. ‘This isn't right,' I said, and it came out as a whisper. ‘We've gone too far.'

‘What do you mean? The elevator is just around the corner. We can find our way back.'

I looked at the boy's eyes, open and dry, the reflection of the harsh fluorescents burning his retinas. I half expected them to suddenly move, to look at me and ask what I was doing. I wanted to lean forward and close them, give him peace, but I was scared. We had interfered too much already.